A lot of you already know what Google Alerts is, as it has been around for a while now. But, I still get asked about it a lot and thought I would make a small post about it.
Google Alerts is basically a way for you to be notified about specific content which meets your search criteria, as it emerges online.
For example, you might be interested in new articles, music, websites, or images regarding an specific artists or celebrity.
So what you would need to do is, got to https://www.google.com/alerts, log into your Google account and type your search criteria.
When Google spiders out over the web and finds new content related to that search they will send you an email with the link. This saves you going out to have to look every 5 minutes and gets you the content as soon as it is found by Google.
The Google Alerts is not perfect. Going back to 2013 Google stated it wasn’t going as well as they liked, but it’s still operation now and still does a good enough job.
Track Backlinks for Your Site
Backlinks are the links other people put on the internet to your website (links back to you). The more backlinks you have the better for your website. It is also highly likely the more links you have to your site the higher you page will show in the Google Search Engine Results.
Adding your website to the Google Alerts is a great way to find out when someone is linked to you.
Monitor A Person
For what ever reason, adding a persons name to Google Alerts will alert you when something happens to that person, when they make headlines or their in some talk of the person. Got to wonder how many employers use this?
News Updates
This probably wouldn’t work so well for bigger cities.
But if you live in a place like Townsville, this would be a great way to monitor the news, traffic and other important information you might need on a daily basis.
For Business
Google Alerts is also a very useful way to get an idea of the popularity of your business.
This would be even be better over time. You could put your business name in Google Alerts, and look back at it over the months and see how much people were talking about it at different times of the year, as different trends arise and as other social and cultural events happen.
